2020 will be a year we'd all like to forget, but with the hope of vaccines arriving soon we should be able to look forward to a better 2021.
The heart of the efforts of your volunteer board is always to help support professional development among our existing members, and to encourage a wider community involvement in raising awareness of fraud and its prevention. In normal times we rely on being able to speak to you personally at our breakfast seminars and twice yearly development courses. The personal contact between our presenters and our audience is a key part of making our presentations such a success. This year we have been forced to try something new through a virtual classroom. The feedback we have received from you and the overwhelming support you've given through your attendance tells us that we have succeeded in very difficult and very experimental circumstances. I am happy to tell you that we have maintained the same number of training events in 2020 as in a more normal year. I want to take this opportunity to thank all our presenters for their efforts in new and challenging circumstances, and to all of those who have attended these sessions for the enthusiasm and commitment you have shown in making these sessions a success.
As we look forward to 2021 we can hope and plan for a return to classroom training and the personal contact our social events contribute to making this such a resilient community. We will be offering a selection of breakfast training events throughout the year and our signature foundation and advanced courses in June and October-November. We hope that by mid 2021 the community health situation will permit both these two major calendar events to be held at Hong Kong University and for our normal social events to restart. We will also adopt an online registration and PayPal payment system to support our training events, reducing the amount of paperwork for both you and us. We will also be considering how we can further develop and cement our relationship with the University of Hong Kong's Criminology programme and the wider local academic community. I hope to share more about our ideas in this area later in the year.
To close I want to thank all our board members for their valued contributions in this most difficult of years, and to highlight the contributions of two people without whom none of our virtual classroom efforts would have been possible. Thanks to Kenneth Lam, our IT specialist for reinventing our classroom, and to Stella Tse, our part-time administrator for supporting us through 2020.
Best wishes to all our members, friends and supporters. We all look forward to a new and better 2021!
Barry Tong
President ACFE HK
